Gender and diversity analysis is necessary to the success of law firms. In fact, diversity metrics are quite openly a common ask from law firm clients. Firms may not often have this sort of information readily available, due to siloed information and custodial/privacy concerns. We get the scoop from Phil Flora from Leopard Solutions about their new searchable gender and ethnic diversity platform, how it works, what it reveals, who can use it, and why. We discuss what was found in terms of the top 200 and below in terms of racial diversity and there is room for improvement. Quite a bit. If firms want to establish a baseline for improvement, this platform might prove a good way to start.
Listen on mobile platforms: 
Apple Podcasts | 
Overcast | 
Spotify
Information Inspirations
Mike Whelan, the author of Lawyer Forward, is doing something crazy. He’s starting 90 episode podcast series called the 90-Day Known Expert. During this time, he plans to teach lawyers how to leverage their writing and publishing skills to become both known in the industry, as well as seen as an expert in the industry. Best of luck on your adventure Mike!!
Professor Bill Henderson lays out a two-part series that wants to turn law firms away from their Rainmaker model into a team model. It worked for Goldman Sachs, why not for BigLaw? (Part One. Part Two.)
Christina Herrmann, Chief Talent Officer at Shipman & Goodwin penned a LinkedIn article reminding us that law firms are a business and that to have a competitive advantage, the C-Suite needs to be filled with the proper talent for what’s coming post-COVID.
Need a visual representation to help you identify common cognitive biases? We have a chart of 50 for you to peruse.
Listen, Subscribe, Comment
Transcript
[0:19]
Marlene Gebauer: Welcome to the Geek in Review. The podcast focus on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.
Greg Lambert: And I’m Greg Lambert. So Marlene, I just love reconnecting with old friends especially during this crazy year of 2020,
Marlene Gebauer: who doesn’t love connecting with old friends?
Greg Lambert: So we do just that on this episode by bringing in Phil Flora from Leopard Solutions to talk about the Leopard Solutions, new gender and ethnic diversity tool, which allows for the measurement of diversity across different law firms for benchmarking, pitches, and other metrics, which are important not only to firms, but to clients and as to the industry as a whole. So you know, we’ve both known Phil for a long time, and it’s always fun catching back up with him.
Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, it seems like not so long ago we met Phil when he was at ALM. Leopard Solutions seems to be a very natural progression for him. So he’s going to lay out what they do and this new gender diversity tool is absolutely fascinating and so, so much that I peppered him with a ton of questions about this just rapid fire. You know, and Phil, as always was very good natured and answered all of my questions very graciously.
Greg Lambert: Yes, he did. Yes, he did.
Marlene Gebauer: He was very patient with me.
Greg Lambert: All right, well, let’s jump into this week’s information, inspirations.
Information Inspirations:
[1:48]
Greg Lambert:: Marlene, my first one is from Mike Whelan. He’s the author of Lawyer Forward, and he’s doing something that even he thinks is a little crazy. So he’s doing a daily podcast for 90 days called the 90 day known expert series.
Marlene Gebauer: Wow
Greg Lambert: Yeah. So on that podcast, he’s going to discuss lawyers who are looking to be both known and who are experts.
Marlene Gebauer: Known Experts.
Greg Lambert: Yeah, but you know, some people might think it’s the same thing. If you’re, if you’re known. You’re an expert. If you’re an expert known but it’s, you know, but according to Mike, it’s not the same thing. And the introduction to it, which I believe started today. He says that becoming a known expert means having the prestige and the know how to deliver insights that no one else can. So basically, it’s it means having a topic and publishing your expertise on that topic. You know, it kind of reminds me of an interview I did with Craig Levinson on the In Seclusion Podcast, where he talked about the needs for lawyers to find a topic to write on. Mike Whelan is is … he’s taken on a lot here
Marlene Gebauer: That’s putting it mildly.
Greg Lambert: Yeah, he’s usually pretty good at delivering on these types of projects and and he definitely has the voice for podcasting but better than mine, so hopefully we can get Mike on this pod at some point and after his pod, get started and see how it’s going.
Marlene Gebauer: That’s is very exciting, you know, I love podcasts experiments and you know people putting out different things and trying them. So, you know if Mike survive this one. Yeah, we’ll definitely have him on.
Greg Lambert: Well, we’ll talk to him as he’s a rehydrating in the hospital.
[3:40]
Marlene Gebauer: Well, we’ll have we’ll have lots of saline for you, Mike. So I read a Bill Henderson post in legal evolution regarding training for lawyers. So this is a two part post and I have both links in the notes. The the focus of Part one is revamping of lawyer compensation systems so they reward teams, rather than individuals. Professor Henderson uses the example of Goldman Sachs in the 1960s, which moved from an individual Rainmaker model to a team model. And of course, we all know what happened after that. World domination. Basically, yeah,
Greg Lambert: pretty much,
Marlene Gebauer: pretty much So the focus Part two is the training or retraining needed to make that model work. And I really I really had to chuckle because I was as I was reading this because Professor Henderson is well aware of how hard it is to get buy in for change management, particularly when the old reward systems make many rich and clients bear the costs. So his core claim is that a law firm can excel at teamwork if team based metrics are combined with the right types of training, lawyers need foundational training and a few management concepts to balance the decades of learned behavior. So things like rewarding intra firm cooperation, investing in training because of impact on culture and loyalty, creating a sense of mission and shared values and transparency about financial matters. Now Professor Henderson also suggests that lawyers need to understand historical arc of their business model And understand that it needs to be retooled really good nerdy stuff here.
Greg Lambert: That’s right up your alley.
Marlene Gebauer: Mm hmm.
[5:31]
Greg Lambert: All right, well, my last one, it comes from Christina Herrmann, who’s the chief talent officer at Shipman Goodman in Connecticut. And she wrote a really interesting piece on LinkedIn entitled, “Now is the Time for Law Firms to Maximize Their C-Suite.” So Herrmann talks about the transitioning and advancement of the C-Suite, post 2008. And the changes on how we viewed the lens, say, like on HR by instead of viewing it as human resources, we view it as the lifespan of talent, or how we shifted the idea of the firm’s financials by looking at the way we planned and priced matters. So the same types of shifts are in process right now. You know, law firms are unique businesses. As you mentioned, Professor Henderson Before he understands, but they are businesses. And there is a need to bring in the experts to make sure that it is actually run like a true business, and not just the result of a disjointed organization with hundreds of owners. So let the attorneys do what they do best and hire the best specialist in the C suites to do what they do best. And Christina Herrmann writes something that many of us hear time and time again, especially as we face challenges, and that is that the law firms who maximize the contribution of their C suite executives to achieve these efficiencies will place themselves in a competitive advantage as we come out of COVID. So I couldn’t agree more.
[7:07]
Marlene Gebauer: I agree. It’s, it’s something that was drilled into me early on in my career. You know, even as a manager and director I was running a small business, offering and marketing a strategic vision, building a brand, assessing and delivering tools and products to customers, measuring client appetite for what we were delivering and adjusting as needed. hiring staff with the necessary skills, change, management, budgeting, all the things you need to run a business. Christina is absolutely right. Hire the experts to run things like a business and you have the advantage. My last inspiration at Greg is visual, I came across a chart of cognitive biases to be aware of. Now the audience for this particular chart was children. So you know, they were using bright colors, they were using animals representing certain types of biases
Greg Lambert: Well you’re spot on for our audience then.
Marlene Gebauer: It was very well done. So I put on my researcher hat and found a chart that was more appropriate for adults. But the catch is there are 50 cognitive biases on this chart. Fifty! One I liked was the Dunning Kruger effect, which is the less you know, the more confident you are. So you’re confident there’s no kelp and ice cream, but you don’t work in the industry, nor have you read the ingredients. I thought that one was very apropos for our life today. And the other one I like was digital amnesia or the Google effect. All right, Greg, I know you’re gonna like this one. So, which is that we tend to forget information that is easily looked up in search engines. So, you know, what was the name of that actor? You know, he was funny. He was in that funny movie with Robert De Niro. Sound familiar?
Greg Lambert: Yeah, but but I will tell you this it. I think that falls in that could also be called the librarian effect is that we don’t know the answer, but I can look it up.
Marlene Gebauer: That’s right. That’s right. And on that note, that wraps up this week’s information inspirations.
Guest Interview:
[9:23]
Greg Lambert: We all understand that when you have goals, there must be ways to measure progress toward achieving those goals. One of the biggest goals that the legal industry is asking law firms to measure is their progress toward a more diverse and inclusive workforce, specifically among the lawyers and the partners of the firm. But how do you find ways to measure diversity? Today’s guest works for a company that released a tool this week that aspires to help the industry do just that.
Greg Lambert: Phil Flora is the Senior Director of Sales and Marketing at Leopard Solutions and is a longtime friend of many of us in the legal information industry dating back to his days with ALM and Leadership Connect. Hey, Phil, thanks for taking some time to talk with us today.
Phil Flora: Thanks. Greg. Thanks, Marlene. I really appreciate you guys having me on.
Greg Lambert: Yeah, we remember you from our days with Kevin Iredale. And I don’t know if you listen to our interview with Kevin. But I’m gonna blame you for letting us say his name wrong this whole time?
Marlene Gebauer: Did you know this?
Phil Flora: Yeah, probably, but I’m from Long Island. So you know, so I’ve butchered a lot of people’s names.
Greg Lambert: Alright, well, well, Phil, you’re now with Leopard Solutions. And most of us know them for their legal recruiting database. But it’s also used by people like me and other business and competitive intelligence professionals to gather insights on on the market as well. Do you mind just giving us just a quick overview of what leveraged solutions does?
Phil Flora: Sure. And I appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, leopard solutions definitely is known for their database of attorneys and helping search professionals legal search professionals with candidate placement. Laura Leopard started the business in 2002. Initially, she looked at top law firms for major metropolitan cities. She went on law firm websites, she put them on CD ROMs. She sent those around to clients. She promised updates every quarter. And then from there, we kind of expanded out from, you know, just those regional cities, the metropolitan cities, to larger firms expanded a database, we have over 4000 firms now, we’re online, obviously, we’re updated weekly. Now we’re updated, actually bi weekly. From there, we launched our firm intelligence tool, which as you mentioned, a lot of legal researchers and competitive intelligence folks use for benchmarking did that around 2012. We also have an in house corporate counsel database About 70,000 in house corporate counsel, that’s updated quarterly, we have a job search platform. So those are our legacy products. And and we’ve been doing that for almost 20 years. from that. Our next big push has been in more predictive analytics. We’re taking all that historical information that we have, and we’re creating algorithms that can predict outcomes based on you know, functions like mergers and acquisitions and what the potential outcomes from that would be from connections tools that you know, will allow law firms to see relationships between law firms and corporate counsel, our law firm predictability, Attorney move predictability tool, which will allow law firms to maintain attorneys and also attract attorneys to, to to their firm, all this while rolling out the diversity search and benchmarking tool, which I think is really exciting for for a lot of reasons, and all that during COVID. And while we’ve been in isolation, so it’s been
Marlene Gebauer: you You’ve been busy.
Greg Lambert: But really what else have you had to do?
Marlene Gebauer: And I mean, I love that history that you’ve given us. I mean, it’s always interesting to see sort of the trajectory of a company like where you start with with, you know, the CD ROMs. And now you’re moving into predictive analytics. So that’s, that’s fantastic. All right. So you touched on the diversity tool, and and you had a major announcement about this, in regard to the leopard solutions, gender and ethnic diversity tool. Now, obviously, with the issues surrounding race in the United States, as well as the demands that law firm clients and other social and economic pressures to show law firms are working on diversity and inclusion within their ranks. This tool seems really timely. What’s the mission behind creating this tool?
[13:46]
Phil Flora: Yeah, I mean, as you mentioned, you know, race and diversity is very top of mind right now. You know, it’s been something that we’ve heard a lot about from our clients over the years. We have a searchable database of attorneys, it’s come up from our users, is there way to find diverse attorneys, either based on ethnicity or gender? To be quite honest, we’ve been a little fearful of doing this in the past to potential for it to be used for the wrong reasons to exclude folks. So, you know, we never really thought the timing is right, you know, law firms aren’t adept at change. They’re a little slow as you guys will know, we think really the the biggest driver of this has been this Mansfield rule which the diversity lab is initiating with a number of firms and outside corporate counsel, that with everything that is going on in the cultural landscape of the world, you know, and we’re a gender diverse organization, the owner, Laura, is a woman, certified women business organization. We have a very diverse culture, in our organization. We’re not very large company, you know, we just felt there was a moral obligation on our part to have, you know, we have the capability of rolling out something like this, we feel that there’s actually pressure being applied to law firms to change their culture, but not only from internal, but it’s also from their external clients. And we really feel the change is coming. And we could be, you know, help be a driver of that change. So, we felt it was a little bit of a moral obligation on our part to be able to really help the industry grow.
Greg Lambert: Now, you mentioned that you tied this to the Mansfield rule. So why Why did you do that? And let me ask, is it limited to only the firms that have made a commitment to the Mansfield rule?
Phil Flora: With the Mansfield rule, we just feel that this is where law firms are really seriously thinking about changing the culture of their organizations. We feel way putting this pledge down to reach minimum standards of 30% inclusion and having corporate counsel apply pressure in their hiring of culturally diverse organizations and partners. We just felt like this was the right time to do it. So that’s, that’s when we really push forward. You know, as far as who can use it, it’s users of our database. We’re not charging anything additional for customers to have access to it. A Mansfield rule firm will have access to it. They have access to it right now. That was launched yesterday. If you’re a non Mansfield rule firm or a legal search professional, and you’re interested in using it for the reasons that are the right reasons to advance diversity in the industry, we’re actually having them sign a Leopard’s Pledge, which is similar in a lot of ways to the Mansfield pledge, it’s, but they have to sign it. Their users have to acknowledge it, when they log in, and they’ll they’ll have access to the search filter. Once they do that. If they don’t sign off on our pledge or they’re not part of the Mansfield rule. They actually won’t have access to the search filter.
Marlene Gebauer: Well, I mean, this this sounds wonderful Phil, but um, we also Know, though that trying to nail down statistics on diversity, especially ethnic diversity can be a moving target. So what are the guidelines that Leopard is using to determine how to identify diversity?
[17:11]
Phil Flora: It’s a good question. So we, you know, we use our AI technology to pull in data from law firm websites. That’s how we do it. And that’s how we’ve been doing it for years, we have over 20 data points that we have currently collected and have collected historically on attorneys in our database. We use that technology and we we create an algorithm looking at specific data points. We looked at specific data points within the attorney profiles, such as their name, such as their memberships, such as their organizations that they’re part of, their countries of origin. And we use that to create what we feel is a list of folks that are highly probable, have a high probability of being diverse from there, though We used our internal data team to go and review each profile individually, further to ensure that the individual would meet our characteristic of being highly probable of being diverse. We’re not tagging individuals with ethnicity, we are not saying this person is of a particular ethnic background, we are just categorizing people that we feel are highly probable being diverse. And that’s the key indicator what we’re doing so
Marlene Gebauer: and that’s and that’s based on the algorithm and on the human review,
Phil Flora: human touch. That’s correct. That’s right.
Greg Lambert: What do you expect law firms and your other clients to actually do with the data?
Phil Flora: Great question. I mean, you know, we expect number one, or you know, folks like yourselves, you know, they’re going to be looking at it for benchmarking purposes, benchmarking their statistical information on their firm versus their competitors. We envision, obviously using the tool to understand just a diverse landscape finding internal individuals into you know, that they could promote from associate to to partner. We want to see them find external folks to bring onto the firm to really meet those diverse goals. You know, some of the statistics we found when we did this research, only 17% of all attorneys in the top 200 are ethnically diverse. Only 10% of the top 200 partners are ethnically diverse, the gender numbers are similar, the under 200 Law Firm numbers are actually worse. So we really want to, you know, see the change happen. And, you know, we think providing the data, you know, the number one thing that we heard from, you know, when we spoke to Diversity Lab was the missing element in all this is the data and we feel like we have that now or we could provide access to that now. It’s going to be updated as all of our information is updated twice a week. You know, again, we just feel like we’re providing a resource for For them to use to really meet their stated goals that they’re pushing, and their clients are pushing.
Greg Lambert: You mentioned the Diversity Lab, which is overseeing the Mansfield rule. So what kind of collaboration and relationship do you have with them?
Phil Flora: Um, nothing, nothing specific. We had an initial call with them, just the the owner Laura and spoke with Karen over there and they had an initial conversation and we basically showcased what our methodology would be, what we could do and how we could help and they were very receptive, you know, everything they said their response back was, again, the missing element the missing piece in all this is the lack of data on diverse attorneys and they felt if we could provide any assistance in that that would really help bridge that gap. They have not put their stamp of approval on this they have not said that this is what you know you guys should do with law firm should do but they really felt the initiative was was a good direction for us to go.
Marlene Gebauer: You’ve mentioned you have, you know, you’re able to call a lot of data points, you know, how granular are we going in terms of the information you can provide? You know, I think in terms of like RFPs, where clients want to know, not only what are your numbers, but who’s at the leadership level, who’s working on my, my work, and my matters, you know, how, how granular can you go?
[21:23]
Phil Flora: Extremely granular. We can slice the data, any number of ways. Like I mentioned, we have over 20 data points on an individual attorney. So you can you can run a search and Leopard list for a partner’s IP partners in Texas that have 10 years of experience that went to certain law US law schools that have a high probability of being ethnically diverse. You can say you can even combine that with gender diversity and say, how many of those are ethnically and gender diverse? You could do again, geography The practice areas specialty job type, pull all that information together, you can even then review the individual law firm BIOS, you have a keyword search filter where you can plug in individual key words within the BIOS, and add that to your search result. And then you’ll be create a report of those of those individual attorneys. And again, you can do that at the law firm level as well. So if you wanted to see which law firms have the most, you know, they have the most gender diversity or ethnic diversity, you know, within a certain practice area within a certain region, and so on. And then you’d be able to, you know, understand that information,
Marlene Gebauer: is there a visual component to the search? Like, are you looking at images? I’m just curious.
Phil Flora: It’s a great question. I mean, you know, it’s a part of it, right? We look at the entirety of the profile, we you know, read the bio, reread, we understand the memberships we understand, you know, the person and you know, we understand the picture is obviously a company component of it, but it’s not the driving force of it. It’s one aspect of it, you know, we look at the entirety of the law firm profile, in conjunction with our algorithm that touches on all those different points. And again, we’re not stating that that person is of any particular ethnicity. We’re just saying that there’s a high probability that that person is diverse. And I think that’s the key aspect of this. This is not self reported data. This is data that we’re using statistical, you know, modeling, if you will, and we’re creating what we feel is a, you know, a fairly accurate representation of what the law firm culture looks like.
Marlene Gebauer: So how do you like, I would figure it’d be easier to get the partners because generally their information is out there, but like, what about the associates and even some of the staff? You know, are you looking at those are you gather information on those? How do you get that?
[23:52]
Phil Flora: Yeah, I mean, it’s it’s at every attorney that has a profile of some capacity on a law firm website is going to have a, you know, a record in our database. You know, one of the good things that we have because we’ve been doing this for 15 years or over 15 years is we also have historical information on a lot of these folks. So you know, an attorney might have been associated another firm, and that might have had an expansive profile. And then you might have lateral over to another firm, which maybe they don’t do as high of a profile. We’ve tagged that person with a unique ID in our database. So we’ve tracked that movement of that individual. So we have our own historical information to also add to that perspective, as we’re showcasing individuals in our in our database. And in house database, we get to track that movement to know well if the in house database only been around since 2017. Again, some of those folks that are in that
Marlene Gebauer: move from firm to in house so you have them too. Great. What efforts are you taking to make sure that the information is accurate and I know I’m getting Kind of harping on this. I’m kind of harping on this point. But this is again a point of interest and concern for me. But what kinds of safeguards do you have in place to correct data? If necessary? And and do you allow input for users of the data to identify any need for correction?
Phil Flora: It’s a it’s a great question. So, you know, obviously, we did a lot of work, our product and development teams have did a tremendous amount of work leading up to the launch yesterday, while living in isolation, they’ve been working really hard, and there was a lot of initial work that needs to be done to roll this out. Moving forward. It’ll be part of our normal updating process, which involves twice a week pulling in the data from law firm websites going through all those, those 20 plus data points that we have with now gender and ethnic diversity being parts of that process, and doing the same type of process of reviewing the information, reviewing the individual BIOS, that human touch is extremely important that we rely on at Leopards. So that’ll be the process moving forward. With that said, I mean, we rolled it out with kind of a disclaimer that we do feel that there’s an error rate about plus or minus 5% for about 95% of the firms that we we have in our database right now, moving forward, we’re obviously going to continue to fine tune that error rate to ensure that we have accuracy and, and and everything is verified. Law firms are there’s going to be inevitably questions. You know, a law firm is going to feel that it’s not represented completely for their firm. And we’re willing to have conversations, Laura has made it very clear that she’s willing to talk directly to anyone at a law firm, and really go through the rosters because we’re, if a law firm said that they’re 20% diverse and we have them at 15% diverse we’re not just going to change the number from 15 to 20%. Because it all rolls back down to the individual attorney. That’s where our numbers come from. So that would mean that we have to look at the roster of each of the individual attorneys and have a conversation and really, you know, understand if there is a diverse individual or diverse attorney that met the criteria that, you know, the National US Census criteria that we’re using, and we did not include them initially, then we will make that change, we’ll have a conversation. It’s not the kind of a one size fits all discussion. With that said, we need to see the verified information. We need to have that data, that conversation back down with each of these firms at the attorney level.
Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, this is really interesting, because it you know, it’s sort of an evidence based discussion, right? Like, you know, you’re presenting evidence, it’s like, Okay, well, you got to present some evidence back to us. In order for us to make the change. It kind of reminds me about when RAVEL first came out, and judges were like, Oh, I don’t rely on that same, you know, same quote all the time and my decisions until they’re presented with the evidence. I was like, oh, okay, maybe, maybe, maybe So, that I think that that’s a that’s a wise way to do it.
Greg Lambert: What are you doing to keep a tool like this from doing the opposite of what the intention is? And I think about things like, you know, Facebook ads, which allowed and I think they’ve stopped doing this, but you know, they allowed realtors to only reach out to people that fit a certain profile, which was not necessarily a diverse profile. So what do you do to keep someone from flipping the process around and using it as a way to exclude diverse candidates instead of actually including them?
[28:27]
Phil Flora: It’s a great question. I mean, it’s, as I mentioned earlier, it’s one of our big was one of our biggest fears and why we didn’t initially do this. We just felt you know, the majority of our customers will use the product or have had great intentions of using the product. If we rolled it out years past, the right way and the correct way for advancement opportunities. We just feel that the climate has changed. You know, it’s it’s a very different time right now. The Mansfield rule would by the Diversity Lab, you know, I brought it up earlier, I just think that lends serious consideration and credibility to the initiative. There’s more data out there that just makes it transparent with, you know, each of the organizations have diversity wise. With that said, we still build some, you know, some functionality into our database to, you know, keep folks from using it in a incorrectly. There is no exclude function within the search for word search tool. You can only include those those components within your search filter. You cannot say, I want IP attorneys in Texas, and that are not averse by gender or ethnicity. With that said, obviously people can do a lot of different things to beat a system if they want.
Greg Lambert: You’re helping honest people stay honest?
Phil Flora: Yes, we’re doing the best we feel it’s the best. It’s the best possible approach. We did our leopards pledge, you know, so they’re on the They’re on the hook, you know, they can violate our pledge, if we find out, you know, if they have saved searches that are in some ways inappropriate. I mean, they’re putting themselves on the line. It’s establishing our it’s establishing, the positive change, and putting the mechanisms in place to create that. And I think we’ve done that. Like I said, we have a very diverse organization. And we had a, we had a win the people over internally that are doing this work before they actually wanted to go and do the work. There was some internal discussions about what this was the right thing to do. And I think ultimately, everyone sees that there’s a general consensus of positive change happening. And I think we’re, we’re happy to be you know, hopefully part of that.
Marlene Gebauer: Well, Phil, if this works out, as you hope, are there any other categories of diversity that you might look at including later?
[30:48]
Phil Flora: Yeah, so the next big area is that in house corporate counsel database, we did not roll out this search. Filter within corporate counsels. It’s only within law firms right now in the law firm side of our database. So that’s obviously next. We also only are showing current diversity data on the law firms and the attorney information, our database, we got over 15 years of data on all the attorney information. So we want to go back and run historical information so that law firms can see how they’ve trended over time. And and they can benchmark, you know, the growth, you know, if someone’s at 15% now, but they were at 5%, three years ago, well, that’s significant. That’s significant, and that should be profiled and recognized. So that’s a big area we’re going to focus on with this. And diversity in general is being applied to really the next big thing that we’re doing, which is our Business Intelligence Suite, which has got all those predictive analytics that we kind of talked about initially. So the mergers and acquisitions predictability tool, which is out now has a cultural perspective of that. So to firms looking to Combine, you know, there’s a lot of different elements that go into that combination. Obviously practice areas and tourney types and all that is important their clients for you know, picture and any potential conflicts are obviously important. A financial aspect is important. But the cultural aspect is, I think tremendously important when you combine two firms and looking at the diversity of the two firms. Looking at their the tenure of the individuals at the firms. Where they went to law school, and all the different elements that go into the individuals at that law firm. And where they potentially could be some conflicts just from looking at the cultural breakdown, I think is important. So that’s right now available. The other aspects, I mean, we’re just rolling out a lot more aspects of our BI suite. You know, I didn’t mention this, but we, we rolled out firm financials for all the non top 200 law firms using predictability as well. So that’s being rolled out a connection tool to see relationships between law firms and corporations. Again, diversity will be an aspect of that. So there’s just a lot of a lot of stuff that 2020 has been an interesting year for for Leopards. And, again, I’ve only been here for six months, and I feel like it’s been six years.
Greg Lambert: We all feel like the last six months has been six years.
Marlene Gebauer: In a good way, in a good way. Well, hey Phil, thanks so much. This has been a really, really interesting conversation. I mean, I, you know, I could go on with with these questions forever. And I’ll probably ask you some once we stop recording. But thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. And I’m really excited to see where this this new diversity platform goes.
Greg Lambert: Yeah, me too. Thanks, Phil.
Phil Flora: Yeah, thanks, guys. I really appreciate you having me on.
Post Interview:
[33:49]
Marlene Gebauer: So that was a really great interview with with Phil today. I mean, I, I was really interested in the history of how they got to this place with with the diversity and the gender and diversity tool that they have. And I mean they’ve just seemed to have a wealth of information, you know, not only in that area, but but all kinds of type of business development area and all types of potentially hiring information. So I thought that was that was just A great insight into to what they’re doing.
Greg Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. And and I know you peppered him with a lot of questions, but, but I thought it was good. I mean, there’s, you could tell, and I and I sat in on the webinar that that Laura Leopard did, introducing this product. And she came right out and admitted that you know, that they were fairly nervous about doing this. And this has not been something that they just came up with this year. This is something that they’ve been thinking about for years. But kudos to them for you know, taking advantage of this situation, this environment that we have in 2020 to roll this out, and really kind of put the ball in the court of the law firms and other clients to say, Okay, this is what you want. Let’s see what you can do with it. So, and I appreciate Phil, you know, that we asked Phil some pretty hard questions.
Marlene Gebauer: We did. I asked Phil some hard questions. He handled them really well.
Greg Lambert: Yeah, we owe Phil a drink.
Marlene Gebauer: Or two
Greg Lambert: Or two. But, you know, I, I appreciate him, you know, being very, very upfront and honest with what they’re doing, what they’re attempting and what they’re not doing. So, again, kudos to them. And I look, I look forward to seeing how well this is accepted into the legal industry.
Marlene Gebauer: Yeah. Because and you, you kind of raised sort of what it does and what it doesn’t do and and look, you know, any type of tool like this is not going to be, you know, 100% solution, but, you know, is it a solution? Is it getting us further than where we were before? You know, it absolutely is and, you know, we have to look at it as just that that this is basically a starting point to be able to do these these measurements and and use them.
Greg Lambert: Yeah, my my only hope is that the issue spotters that are lawyers don’t sit here and get get down into the weeds on this and get and get mired. into the details. So yeah,
Marlene Gebauer: well, I think we talked about it’s a starting point.
Greg Lambert: It’s a starting point. All right, well, thanks again to Phil Flora from Leopard Solutions for taking the time to talk with us.
Marlene Gebauer: Exactly. Before we go, we want to remind listeners to take the time to subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Rate and review, as well. If you have comments about today’s show, or suggestions for a future show, you can reach us on Twitter at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or you can call the Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 or email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com And as always, the music here is from Jerry David DeCicca. Thank you, Jerry.
Greg Lambert: Thanks, Jerry. All right, Marlene, I will talk with you later.
Marlene Gebauer: All right, ciao. For now.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai